The Delusional SOTU

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  • I can’t watch much of a State of the Union Address by any Democratic President, let alone Biden. It’s just too painful. But as a service to readers, I did watch a small portion, and then I skimmed through the transcript when it was released by the White House.

  • Mostly, this exercise is useful be sure one understands the governing philosophy that informs our President and at least the Democrats in Congress. And this speech does inform us of that.

  • Really, there’s nothing complicated about it. The federal government has infinite amounts of free money to hand out to solve every conceivable problem of the people. There are no costs, no downsides, no tradeoffs — or at least none worth mentioning. Name the issue, and the feds will create a “program” and pass out the money.

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No Energy Realism In Bidenland

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  • As per my previous post, the situation in Ukraine should be a wake-up call to every sentient person to ditch the fantasies about wind and solar energy ASAP, and make sure that we have real energy that works.

  • The wind/solar delusion, combined with active suppression of fossil fuels and even of nuclear, are basically financing Vladimir Putin’s war via increased oil and gas exports and higher prices. Meanwhile, the brave Ukrainian armed forces are certainly not running on the wind and sun; nor are the Russians who are attacking them.

  • In 2021, after finally achieving energy independence under President Trump, the U.S. immediately gave that up as the Biden Administration brought fresh rounds of fossil fuel suppression.

  • There are plenty of people in positions of power and/or influence in and over our government who are so taken with the religious fervor of “green” energy and “net zero” emissions that no amount of critical real world events can penetrate their mental armor.

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Ukraine And Energy Realism

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Ukraine And Energy Realism

  • For a long time I have thought that the public in Western countries would wake up to the absurdity of fossil fuel suppression when the price of energy to the consumer rose high enough. And to a substantial degree that has begun to happen.

  • But the cost of fossil fuel suppression is not merely a modest degradation in our comfortable lifestyles and impoverishment of the poor.

  • As the situation in Ukraine is now demonstrating, fossil fuel suppression in the U.S., Europe and other Western countries also entails significant empowerment of our most significant geopolitical adversaries, and poses major risks to world security, and even to our national security.

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350.org Outted As White Supremacists

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350.org Outted As White Supremacists

  • Today’s radical left progressive movement has two main branches. The two share the common element of fundamentally arising from the deep need of wealthy people to expiate their guilt over their sins of economic success and comfortable lifestyle. But in other ways the two branches are totally contradictory.

  • The two branches of the movement are:

  • The environmental branch, now completely swallowed up by the cult of climate alarmism and the demand to rid the world of fossil fuels. Here wealthy and almost entirely white activists and donors form and fund NGOs to protest and lobby to get the government to suppress energy that is cheap and that works, and thereby to drive up the cost so as to force low income people and members of minority groups into energy poverty all in order (supposedly) to “save the planet.”

  • The diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) branch, currently focused on the demand for equal economic outcomes in all societal positions and jobs except NBA player. In this branch of the movement, an overlapping group of nearly-as-entirely white and wealthy activists and donors prove their superior virtue by demanding ever more aggressive affirmative action programs that somehow never work to alter economic outcomes among ethnic groups, while simultaneously accusing everyone else of “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.”

  • Given the fundamental inconsistencies of the goals of the two branches of the progressive movement, it’s actually remarkable how the two have managed to minimize what could easily turn into major conflicts. But in recent months things have boiled over at an organization called 350.org.

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The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXX

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  • Friday’s post principally reported on the recent (February 8, 2022) article by O’Neill, et al., in Atmospheres, “Evaluation of the Homogenization Adjustments Applied to European Temperature Records in the Global Historical Climatology Network Dataset.”

  • In the piece, O’Neill, et al., dramatically demonstrate that the NOAA/NCEI “homogenization” algorithm is wildly off the mark in its intended mission of identifying and correcting for supposed “discontinuities” or “breakpoints” in weather station location or instrumentation in order to provide a more accurate world temperature history.

  • At the same time, although not mentioned in O’Neill, et al., the NOAA/NCEI algorithm is wildly successful in generating a world temperature history time series in the iconic hockey stick form to support the desired narrative of climate alarm.

  • What should be done?

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The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXIX

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The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXIX

  • This is the 29th post in a series going all the way back to July 2013.

  • For newer readers, what I refer to as “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the systematic alteration of world temperature history records to create and/or augment a warming trend, and thereby support a political narrative that the world’s energy economy needs to be completely transformed by government command in order to avoid catastrophic human-caused climate change.

  • A U.S. government agency called the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI, in turn a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is part of the Department of Commerce) is the most important source for world historical temperature information. NCEI collects data monthly from a network of several thousand ground-based weather stations both in the U.S. and around the world, and reports the results in various “global time series” going back to 1880.

  • When graphed, the NCEI data show the classic “hockey stick” formation, with rapid, and seemingly alarming, temperature increases in recent years.

  • But the NCEI data as presented have been subject to extensive massaging, referred to as “homogenization,” before being finalized and presented to the public as the alarming hockey stick.

  • Curious citizens, seeing the governmental threatening the reliability and cost of the energy system, might reasonably ask, what is the level of accuracy of the temperature presentation, and how much of the presented temperature increase is real versus an artifact of adjustments made by bureaucrats with a vested interest in getting the “right” outcome?

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